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tv   ABC7 News 1100AM  ABC  April 19, 2013 11:00am-11:31am PDT

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it. in a couple of cases they had leads where they thought there might have been reason to believe that somebody was -- suspect number two was in a certain place. they had a false lead somebody was being held a gunpoint. they had a couple of different things where 20 or 30 cars race down the street with sirens blaring and the street and sirens blaring. they do occasionally get what they think a promising lead that make them think that something unusual is in the building and for some reason someone was not acting right when they went to the door and in that case they swarm that area. >> again, for anyone at home just joining us, just checking in. i want to bring you up-to-date on a couple of key facts. police say they have gone through 60% to 70% of the homes. they have knocked on the doors and checked on them and the manhunt under way for the suspect, dzokhar tsarnaev. >> he was in the city of watertown after midnight. the suspect number one was killed and that he was walking
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away after that fire fight. you see the timing of the entire evening there. it began with a robbery at a 7-eleven followed by the killing of a officer at m.i.t. and carjacked a driver of the suv and the fire fight, as we said fierce and it included grenades and firearms. police believe that dzhokhar had an automatic rifle and we know he is heavily armed going into the fire fight. they found a triggerlike device on the body on his brother that led them to believe that he could have a suicide vest which is one more reason why they are being so careful as they go house to house methodically in watertown right now. >> and one of the ironies that occur his brother was taken to the medical center, i believe, and that was where so many of the wounded of the boston marathon
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were taken, and they tried to save his brother. >> after 15 to 20 minutes, we don't ask who it is or what they did and we simply want to do our job. >> they wanted to take him alive. that would have been a huge help for law enforcement if hay had him alive if they had the chance to question him. >> they're being very careful at this point and quite patient on the hopes that perhaps they still can take dzhokhar, even if unexpected. >> let's be clear, they're not being patient and risking the possibility that he's going to get away been they would prefer to take him alive. they will take him dead. they're not going to take the chance again of letting him get away, but being able to talk to him, being able to question him, being able to figure out whether there could be others involved in this would be incredibly valuable for law enforcement
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here and that would be their preference, for certai i bfbi ofer brad garret i aling ut thi completely conic personality. we hear about this wonderful friend to all of his friends. it's not your usual loner who had no friends out there, and then we know what he is suspected of doing. try to help us through this. >> okay. diane, step out of terrorism just for one second and let me tell you a very quick story. when you look at serial offenders, particularly serial rapists, i've worked dozens of these cases, these guys are well liked and take their kids to the playground and go to church and go out and rape at night. the reason i say that is it's easy for people who can break their life into two areas. their bad side and their good
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side and are very effective at covering the bad side. i think you can apply that to this situation where both of those guys apparently were quite effective in leading this public life, hey, everything's great. it's america, we're playing soccer, and then we're driving down this road for whatever reason, death and destruction because of some higher calling, i suppose. >> as you were talking we just learned that the campus of the unerty of dartmouth, a helicopter just landed and it the boston police department, s.w.a.t. team and the entire campus has been evacuated. presumably they're going to the dorm rooms. >> it probably does hold clues, george. the other important thing is you and i talked about this earlier today. he's 19 years old. he obviously doesn't have means of money if they're robbing
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7-elev 7-elevens. he's probably got a limited, and probably has people aligned with bad side, he may have gone to one of them and my guess is law enforcement is going through cell phone records, emails, et cetera. >> just to be clear, and i know you want to say this, too. weir talking about a connection we have no grasp of here in terms of being muslim. it says we didn't have anything to do with this at all. >> it may not, but it almost doesn't matter. what does matter is what with evidence there might be. could it be, and i'm clearly making this up, and nothing driven by white supremacists or patriots or sovereign citizens or domestic extremist group, think it's all right.is they they think it's okay to do t bsr
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beliefs, you're bad, they're good and it's that simple and whatever drives these two guys, that part is the same. >> martha raddatz is chief correspondent of global affairs and what's going on here right now, all of the search is for a potential international connection. >> as john said we're not going to hear about that until they have a smoking gun. an official i spoke to, and i said is there an international connection? do you have that yet, and he basically said that is the million dollar question. we are strictly not going to speculate, and the reason i don't want to speculate is because of the ramifications, if they come out and if they leak something about some possible connection about some international terrorist groups or government, then what does the united states do about that? let's say, for example, it's iran, and i'm throwing that out there to just show the
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complications of what the u.s. would do. there's no evidence whatsoever, but that shows you how complicated this is and why they have to have something specific be working on this for days. they have been working on this since the bombing, and not particularly these two young men, but looking for an international connection -- >> the answer to this, they're not going to say anything until they know for sure what they discovered, but any inkling at all? any vibrations through the intelligence system? >> the only vibration, i'm getting from this, george and diane, is that they're clearly interested and keep probing, probing, probing and they're not going tell us small things they might find unless they're absolutely certain there is a connection.
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i did ask an official out there, the brother went to russia last year and didn't come back for six months and said, does that mean anything to you? not necessarily at all. you never know, but what they're looking for is if and when these two young men got guidance from anybody. we are told to go out and try to attack american citizens. that's what they're looking for, but it has to be clear. it has to be very strong evidence before you'll hear anything about that. >> i want to bring in you and dick, as well. because i'ying trememb how long it was before we had someone claiming responsibility, and i'm wondering what would you expect -- >> i'm going to grab this phone. >> okay. we have another phone call coming in. >> did you expect someone overseas to be claiming responsibility by now if that was the case? >> no. i think anyone overseas who may be involved would probably be
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wise not to claim responsibility if they value their life. you know, this question of overseas responsibility is not a yes or no. it's a spectrum. the guy in yemen ayman al awlaki is now dead and was influencing people through emails and telephone calls to do attack, but there's also the influence that just comes from the jihadi website to urge everyone to do attacks. the al qaeda magazine which is online inspire in english, urges people to do attacks and tells them how to do it. so is there a foreign end? it's not going to be a yes or no situation, perhaps they don't know yet, but it could be somewhere in the middle. >> one thing we do no, though, dick is that there have been few attacks here since 9/11 eaven though the fear was people
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inspired by al qaeda going after soft targets in the united states. >> i've never understood that. in the weeks after 9/11 president obama asked me for what could happen next and we predicted that there would be a lot of attacks like this. it's been a decade and it hasn't happened. now, the fbi has stopped a lot of things before it happened, and initiating people in the united states, but i would have expected a lot more to have happened just like this, and i don't know why it hasn't. >> thanks very much. let's go back to brian in watertown who has been told about a possible controlled explosion that may be imminent. >> they're in the course of doing that. it is 2:00 in the afternoon in the east coast and only several hours of daylight left and the more they can do in daylight the happy they are with about it. they're go about to do that to make sure there are no booby traps in there and agens and
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police officers will go in following these controlled detonations which will essentially put an end to the risk that something would blow sky high, it will blow as best as they cacon ntrol it. >> that's the home in cambridge, massachusetts. we just leard w moments ago that the police arr at dzokhar's dorm room at the university of dartmouth. >> reporter: right, they seem to be throughout the area, i see them adding more data points as they go along. new leads and connections of these men that they have or have had and as they charted out, perhaps it was more than just the two of them. it seems like it was something bigger than just the two of them. the connecticut state police have said be on the lookout for the 1999 green honda civic. dzhokhar's soccer buddy, referenced, as well who appears
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to be the third call that could have been associated with the suspects and dan abrams, this is going on now all across -- >> that's what makes me a little nervous about where we are in this investigation. in a perfect world they've got him tied in, basically. they've got this area that they are -- they shall he really is likely to be in. for law enforcement hat's a good cause they're going to fin quickl once they start issuing these broader lookouts doesn't mean that it's notally a bad sign, but it does mean that it's possible that he could be in a far wider area when you talk about the northeast. that could mean a far longer accomplice with the call. >> that's right. or an accomplice which is also a problem in the context of the investigation. they located the cars. >> that's right. >> at this point the civic --
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again, we were told he was giving a ride to his soccer buddy and that may have been the primary car he was using before this. >> and we know from the man who had a repair shop in his neighborhood that he came in and asked about a white mercedes on tuesday and wanted it repaired and took that car away, as well. >> let's just put this information out again because everybody is still watching. one of you might see it. it has happened before. >> a 1999 green honda civic massachusetts license plate 116 gc7. that's a 1999 green honda civic massachusetts plates 116gc7. is investigaonow andongs of they're both urgence. number one, is finding him and number two is finding out are there others involved? if there are, who are they and where are they? those are equally important issues. >> do we assume that this is the
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first time they've gone into his room at umass dartmouth? presumably, there may be a computer there and they may have gone in before and you said they've gone in now and we don't know physically who's been in yet. >> the authorities will be smart not to tell us each and every detail of what they're doing in the investigation and sort of how far they are and it was in part because they don't want him to know, but each and every one of their actions at all times. with that said there's no question that his dorm room is an essential part of this investigation, but as we've seen over the last couple of hours, we have seen and heard that the authorities are at family members' homes and they're trying to figure out and piece together who we knew and what connections he may have had. again, as part of this two-pronged investigation. >> as we await the controlled explosion, we have warned everyone that they're about to perform, i want to bring in dick
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looking back at monday and looking back at the kind of explosives and you were talking before about foiled plots previously of all kinds in this country. do they suggest to you that one of those incidents, for instance, the times square bomber and the kind of explosives he had. give us a sense from this vantage point where their explosives -- where they were on the spectrum of lethal explosives. >> this was perhaps, one of the simplest bombs to put together when the materials involved are readily available and they may actually have large, firecracker-type things and ground them to get the explosive power. >> this was probably on the low end of difficulty to acquire, to procure. on the low end it's difficult to actually put together, but as we
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saw it was thal within a short range it was very lethal. >> this is dan abrams here. is that based upon what we know about the explosives? does that tell anything about the type of health you might not have had in connection to this? >> yeah. i think it suggests and i emphasize, suggests that they were acting without any significant outside help except what they could get on the internet and certainly if this were a sophisticated al qaeda attack and it would have killed a hell of a lot more people. >> does the fact that they had some fairly heavy weaponry on the firefight last night, does it feel to you like they had a plan to have subsequent attacks or an escape plan that got foiled? >> it certainly looks like they had a plan for subsequent attacks and say they had another of these pressure cooker bombs
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and when they got cornered. they had it in one of their cars last night so they may have been going somewhere with it to plant it and to have another bomb go off. we don't know. we may never know, but it does look to me like they had a sophisticated plan or they would have escaped on monday >> every time the phone rings weir thinking ossible we're getting new information. martha? >> i just want to agree with joel about looking into that international connection and whether there was an international connection and the official said the exact same thing. we have to find something specific, but from the very day he said of the bombings, since the day it happened we have pulled out everything. we have experienced over 12 years of war, the capable its of this country to look overseas and to look at people overseas
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and to look for signs is enormous, but they have to go through that methodically and he was saying, look, we have to go through every radical link we can possibly think of. we have to look at other family members and distanced family members. i mentioned chechnya. they don't usually launch attacks toward the united states. they said weir not discounting everything. we are looking at everything and i also talked again about the problem with the ramifications, if the u.s. government pinses this on another country on another group, al qaeda, even, what do we do?what do we do if connection? that's why they are going so slowly, so methodically. they have to specifically find that those two young men or one of them got guidance, got funding, got anything that will connect them to that crime to another country and they are not ready to do that yet.
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they do not have a smoking gun. >> pierre thomas, it doesn't appear there was much chatter coming in before the attacks, but how about overall? what has the intelligence been like, pierre, tom cass as, in the last several months of international attacks in general? >> well, we know, again, that there was no specific credible threat before the boston marathon. we did an exclusive interview with the attorney general earlier this year and he talked about the fact that while al qaeda's central had been devastated and if you look at the overall terrorism pictures, one of the things that concerned him most is that you had so many splinter groups and also people being radicalized on the internet, and also people that would bring up lone wolves as they called them. he said that the terrorism picture was as difficult and energetic and dynamic as it had been since 9/11. al qaeda central devastated, but
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so much complicated in terms o the number of things he said he had to worry about and again, every day he was going over to the fbi and that was the first thing he did to get his briefing with the fbi director. >> pierre, when we look at those tapes from the surveillance, you said they had facial recognition capabilities, but these were not two guys that were in the files. they weren't in the database, were they? >> i have not been able to speak to that yet. the fbi has a lot of capabilities and the intelligence community has a lot of capabilities as dick clark would tell you would surprise some of us, but i can tell you this, law enforcement officials do believe that putting out those images and those photographs and that video was a critical break in the case and these men had such ties to the community and so many people knew them. they believe -- at least some of my sources believed that that spd them to take actio prior source w emed to be
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identify tand put those pictures out that quickly. >> they certainly had messages and driver's licenses, you know that. >> you can't run facial recognition software, soaly though it doesn't appear to have happened. it could have happened and eventually they would have found out where they were just by crunching through databases. >> weir just getting word from a federal law enforcement source tamerlan tsarnaev flew out of kennedy airport. a pretty significant amount of time. >> russia is a very big place and includes chechnya, and includes dagestan. so he might well, it looked like earlier like he might have had some training along the way.
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he might have had training in a camp in one of those places during that period of time. >> chechnya is inside the has otten avel between russia proper and chechnya because with so military activity i thought there would be somrestriction. >> there are probably some restrictions, but if he had family roots he might have been able to do so especially if he was somehow sponsored by a chechen rebel group or something he could have been slipped through the lines. >> i want to bring in emily cyrus, a resident of cambridge and the worldwide possibilities and we have to remember the people sitting in their homes and with perhaps the possibility he's in the house next door, and i know you're in cambridge that you live near the 7-eleven where there was the incident last night. >> yes. >> emily, tell us at this moment what you have been through in these last hours.
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>> you know, it's been very surreal. i'm at home with my family, and i grew up in cambridge. this is my hometown, and i love it very much, and it's -- it almost seems like an ordinary spring day except for then you look outside and you see almost no one on the street, almost no cars and you hear the constant sound of sirens. >> and are you there with your family? are there children? >> yes. i have two boys, and you know, we're trying to keep them calm and we're doing things like playing monopoly and kind of distract them, and wknow that they are -- we're sort of half st where the residence was and the 7-eleven. so we know that they're planning to have some detonations and trying to get red for that. >> all right.
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are they asking you questions? what kind of things do you say to them to try to keep them calm in this moment? >> just that they're safe, you know, and that we have so much law enforcement outside and that they're going to take care of it and that we can just hope that they are safe and that this will all be over soon. >> thank you, emily. we have some new pictures coming in now that we want to show you. if we can pick up on the screen, i want to bring in martha raddatz. >> those are the pictures we've been talking about, george. >> tell us about them. >> that is tamerlan, the older brother who was killed by police. he is practicing boxing at the y it's the captions of these pictures that are really what stand out. here he is practicing and the photographers have each of the
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pictures and living in the united states for five years, tamerlan says i don't have a single american friend. i don't understand that. >> this young woman, he is in several photographs, we have no idea who she is. we have no idea whether it's the person he references as a girlfriend, so i do not want to identify that young woman as such, but in each picture he says he doesn't usually -- there's a picture -- there's one of the pictures where he does not have a shirt on. >> we'll show that one. >> tamerlan says -- >> yes. let's put that one back up. tamerlan says he doesn't usually take his shirt off so girls don't get bad ideas. i'm very religious. that is the caption under that specific picture. tamerlan says he doesn't drink or smoke anymore, god says no alcohol. a muslim, he says there are no values anymore and worries that
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people can't control themselves. one ing, these pictures are apparently from 2010. we keep saying he's been here five years. if that's from about 2010 he's probably been here in the united states about eight years, traveling back as you said to russia last year which i did ask that official about and what that meant, but he was a very will skilled boxer, very skilled and went to this gym all of the time and was trying to be in the olympics. the pictures are from a magazine called "the comment," the graduate student magazine at the boston university college of communications and the headline for these photographs is "will box for passport. an olympic drive to become a united states citizen." the coach said he was good enough to be pro and was good enough to be pro and you asked about the official about the six months in russia and any
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indication and whether they're learning about it now? >> that's the exact kind of thing they are looking at right now. one of the things they tracked down and there was no chatter building up to this. we didn't know there was any threat. we didn't know there was a specific internationalt and what they are doing right now is going back over those. he hasn't anything and what they'll do with the brothers traveling, who did they visi how can they track them? try to talk to people who he talked to when he traveled back there and whether he was in some sort of training camp. the capable its of the united states at this point to listen in on people and to track people are absolutely enormous and that is what's going on now. it's not that they're look for a smoking gun tomorrow, they're seeing if they even had one in these past weeks that they may have missed. >> he was good enough to box and he boxed in local tournaments and hifoerhe
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spoke chechen, russian, english and was a decent piano player and said that his brother, his younger brother was intro verted, but he was the extrovert and i want to bring in adriana who has been on the telephone with their father because i know you talked about both brothers. specifically, what did he say, is it tamerlan. >> we should preface this by saying does say he is their father. he admitted that these are his children and that's all that's going on. he says that he is their father though all of the other examples that he's given that this is his brother, ruslan is his brother that seems to work with the evidence that we have right now. that he worked in the auto industry. he told me dzhokhar had not been back to russia and this is news right now. >> back to the question of finances and everyone will be tracking this, but the father -- >> the father said they were
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comfortable and no financial woes as of late. dzhokhar was on financial aid and he was surprised when i told him that the 7-eleven. been ro bed and this was news to him when i was talking to him on the phone. >> can we talk about, with rush a for the older brother. what conversations should they have with russian lauchl and how much would we be able to find out? >> i think, george, in this type of scenario situation, we think there is some reasonable information out of the russians, but keep in mind the russians may not have specific information. as dick mentioned earlier, russia is a big place, and did he have connections to go up to chechnya and cross the border, ifhat's truend be trained. so to answer your question, we
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do, on some level, have a reasonable relationship for this type of intelligence. >> they would want to help out here. they would want to help out, but it is also their enemy. if these two brothers are connected to that particular count r country, then the russians will want to help us because that's who they fight daily. >> i just want to let everybody know who is wondering what it is like to be in boston right now. all mass transit has been suspended indefinitely and we hear that they are telling commuters via twitter, just go home, go home, but logan airport does remain open at this moment and we heard brian ross say the taxis are allowed to move around at this point. >> the city has been on lockdown. we have lindsay davis with us now in watertown. she has stepped away right now. is bon us?

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